Review: Soundfreaq Sound Stack SFQ-03

Sub Title: Super Freaq

Soundfreaq Sound Stack SFQ-03

8/10

Wired

Great sound with excellent reproduction of midrange stuff like vocals, guitars and horns. Nicely defined bass with zero distortion. A plethora of connection options. Hot looks. Better at the Bluetooth dance than almost everything else out there. 0 is a good price for what you get.

Tired

Top volume isn’t as loud as comparable units in the same price range. Low-end bumps and thumps, but it won’t shake ya rump. Smartphone apps can’t compete with the nifty hardware remote (unless you miss your NPR). Buttons need LEDs.

There are now 7 billion people in the world, and likely enough speaker docks for every last human to pick up two.

While the sea of audio accessories has grown deep enough to make the shelves at Best Buy look like the Bangladeshi lowlands, it is, remarkably, still a chore to find a speaker dock that delivers great sound at a good price and doesn’t gunk up your decor.

That’s why we’ve always liked Soundfreaq. The company makes speaker docks that look great, sound great, and, while on the expensive side, don’t push the limits when it comes to cost.

Soundfreaq’s newest release, the Sound Stack, is the company’s third major product and, at $400, its most costly. It’s also the most versatile and the most successful ‘Freaq yet.

The design is an austere black brick — far more Mies than Gehry. Capacitive controls run along a slim lip that juts out from the base, with an iOS dock-connector in the middle. The connector can charge any Apple mobile, including iPads. On the back, there’s a USB port for charging non-Apple devices, a mini-jack for plugging in your Sport Discman. There’s also an optical-in connection — a necessity, considering the crowd spending $400 on a speaker dock care deeply about such things.

Like all other Soundfreaq speaker docks, this one does Bluetooth — a wise choice, given the ubiquity of Bluetooth and the still-not-quite-there experience of Apple’s AirPlay.

Behind the layer of stoic black speaker cloth are dual 3-inch Kevlar drivers and dual 3-inch subwoofers. One bass speaker points to the back, and one points to the front, and they operate in a push-pull configuration.

The sound is simply great. The results are crisp and well defined with very little coloring. The highs are especially clear. The mids are sharp and rather forward, but not overbearing — you don’t get that nasal, honking tone found in speakers that pump up the mids. Just the right boost is applied to vocals, guitars, horns, pianos, and any sounds that live in the middle frequencies.

The Sound Stack does lack depth on the low end, especially compared to more powerful and more expensive systems like the B&W Zeppelin Air, which doles out bass waves like a bazooka. But what it loses in swagger, it makes up for in clarity. I could hear the punchiness and definition of Paul Jackson’s finger-style electric bass in Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man,” a nuance that was lost in the bottomless low end of the Zeppelin. And even though Chris Wood’s upright bass solo in Medeski, Martin and Wood’s “Latin Shuffle” didn’t have the massive, skull-rattling weight it does on the Zeppelin, I could hear the attack of every plucked note more clearly on the Sound Stack.

In addition to the $600 Zeppelin, I also compared it to the $200 Altec Lansing inMotion Air 725 and the new $300 Sony RDP-X500iP. As far as audio quality goes, the Sound Stack slots into place among those devices exactly where you’d expect it to, given the $400 price tag.

Besides a big bottom, one other thing it lacks is sheer volume. Soundfreaq co-founder Matthew Paprocki tells me the engineers tugged the reins a little on the Sound Stack’s amp to keep customers from pushing the speakers to the point of distortion, mucking up the sound and ruining the hardware (This was a problem we noticed when we tested the first Soundfreaq box, which distorted rather easily). But, he says, they did nudge the power right up to the edge, tuning it to handle as much volume as physically possible. I threw on some bass-heavy jams (Dr. Dre, Prince, some Mastodon), cranked it up as loud as it would go, and everything sounded tight with no distortion.

Still, “as loud as it would go” wasn’t quite loud enough for a party. I found the Stack performs best in smaller rooms — it fared better in my dining room and bedroom than in my large living room, or in the bustling and expansive Wired office. But in a smaller or mid-sized room, it sounds phenomenal. It provided the perfect volume level for a small gathering in my home office. You could also use it as a center-channel speaker in an A/V system, or as a nicer stereo rig for your TV that (bonus!) charges your iPhone while you watch Torchwood.

Tighter confines bring out other positives, too, since the stereo separation remains clearly evident until you get about 10 feet away. That’s an impressive feat considering the thing really isn’t that big — the speakers are only about a foot apart.

The Sound Stack also has an on-board digital signal processing (DSP) chip that Soundfreaq calls UQ3. It does the common spatial-widening trick that lends itself best to folk, classical and other acoustic music. You can toggle it on and off.

Bluetooth pairing is seamless. Soundfreaq understands how much of a pain point this is on other devices, so it’s always put a big “Pair” button right on the face of its docks. I paired the Stack to five different devices (iPhone 4, iPad 2, Android phone, Samsung tablet and a notebook) and never experienced a hiccup. The sound over Bluetooth is surprisingly good — not as good as when you plug an iPhone into the dock connector, but that’s expected.

On the Sound Stack, the buttons are all capacitive, and they’re grouped into tight clusters. The source display is backlit, but the buttons aren’t. This causes some fumbling even in softly lit rooms. Like any device, you eventually learn the layout and you’ll be able to touch the right spot every time, but for the week or so I tested our loaner, there was much stooping, squinting, and using the iPhone screen as an ad hoc flashlight.

The physical remote is a slim slab with membrane keys. It’s small and the buttons have a nice feel. A magnetic clasp secures it to the back of the Sound Stack, so you can store the remote out of sight without losing it.

There’s also a remote app for iOS and Android that lets you select tracks. It’s just OK — it works, but it’s sort of inelegant. But there is a digital FM tuner built into the Soundfreaq, and if you must have your radio, the app is the easiest way to dial in stations.